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Wednesday, 1 June 2011

As with all best laid plans my posts for National Vegetarian Week came to a bit of a shuddering halt! I ended up not having to cook at all over the weekend as the kids were kindly taken off my hands and fed at Grandma's house leaving me to eat junk by myself. I didn't go over as I had a bit of a cold and my in-laws are a little bit vulnerable health wise.

So what did I learn?

Peeling tomatoes, well worth the effort. Even though I still hate it!

Planning properly saves money (more money for yarn!)

My stir fry pan is an absolute pain in the arse to clean and will go rusty once you turn your back on it. Needs re-oiling.

Need to work on my pizza dough skills, pastry too for that matter.

My hands smelt of garlic - a lot!

I am going to try and keep up the momentum of trying new things. It's all too easy to fall into a food rut and end up having the same things even repeated on the same days of the week.

On to WIP Wednesday. Well not a lot going on knitting wise. My Little Coffee Bean cardigan has stalled on the first sleeve, mainly because this .....

has now spoken to me and told me what it would like to be, at last! Big news. I've been waiting so long to make my first blanket that I wanted it to be just right, you know? I have been trawling through Ravelry projects on and off just waiting for something to catch my eye. I wanted something that was made up of motifs so I wouldn't have to drag a whole blanket in-progress around with me and I am not a fan of join-as-you-go anyway. I also didn't want anything with a neutral border so all the colours could sit together in their wonderful brightness. And then I found it!

I have wound all 2kg of my basket of yarn into cakes to try and cut down on tangliness, plus it was a lot of fun Also meant I could find any knots or lumpy bits beforehand and snip them out before they had chance to ruin anything. There wasn't as many as I thought there would be, only 3 out of the 20 had any problems but one of the balls is now in 4 little bits. Grr! Nevermind.

I got my trusty hooks out and did some swatches and then realised it had been so long since I crocheted anything I had forgotten how! It took me a few tries to get it right. I pushed my swatches under the families' noses but they couldn't tell the difference between them. It is all too tempting (for me anyway!) to plot out the colour sequence on paper first or make a list of potential colour matches but I thought I would just get on with it! It's going to take me long enough to finish as it is without being finicky. I will take a progress pic once I am a bit further on, I'm only on 8 and have been naughty and haven't sewn my ends in yet and they look a bit of a mess. But they are keeping me verrry happy! I'm hoping the drive of wanting to see it finished will be enough to keep me going but I already have 'crochet claw' from too much hooking.

As always I like to try and add something useful to my not very useful posts so here is a link to a fab video for making a magic circle to begin crochet in the round. I am completely weird in that I don't like holes in the middle of my crochet so it's important that I learned this! It's also good for things that need to be worked tightly like amigurumis and toys.

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Hellooo!

How are you? Thank you for visiting me here at Happy Elastic. I'm a thirty-something mum to three children and wife to a man with a beard. We live fairly harmoniously in our complete wreck of a house in Staffordshire, UK.